Companies have sought to integrate existing systems in order to implement information technology (IT) support for business processes that cover present and prospective systems requirements needed to run the business end-to-end. To accomplish such tasks, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been created which is designed to unify business processes by structuring applications as an ad hoc collection of small modules called services. People both inside and outside the company can use these applications across enterprise systems. SOA can thus support integration and consolidation activities within complex enterprise systems.
More specifically, SOA is a computer architectural style for creating and using business processes, packaged as services. SOA also defines the IT infrastructure to allow different applications to exchange data and participate in business processes. These functions are loosely coupled with the operating systems and programming languages underlying the applications. The SOA provides integration of third party products into the overall information technology landscape with provision for reuse of resources and elimination of redundant development and support costs by facilitating the rapid development of business solutions.
In conventional systems, SOA separates functions into distinct units (services), which can be distributed over a network and can be combined and reused to create business applications. SOAs build applications out of software services that are intrinsically unassociated units of functionality, which have no calls to each other embedded in them. The SOA is not tied to a specific technology and, as such, it may be implemented using a wide range of technologies, including SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), RPC (Remote Procedure Call), DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model), CORBA, Web Services or WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). The key to SOA is independent services with defined interfaces that can be called to perform their tasks in a standard way, without the service having foreknowledge of the calling application, and without the application having or needing knowledge of how the service actually performs its tasks.
However, existing SOA test tools are limited to single application specific functional, performance, end to end testing with short running transactions. As such, currently available SOA test tools also have limited SOA test coverage for unit and functional tests only. That is, the current SOA tools have excellent performance testing, but with limited functional verification. The current SOA test tools also have performance testing without functional verification. These same tools also have a lack of integration capability with non-compatible test tools, have synchronous transaction execution and are primarily web services oriented test solutions. Current SOA tools also lack modeling capabilities for end-to-end process validations support, and do not support batch transaction processing
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.